Actor Alan Davies on why he won’t talk about ‘the A-word’

By Ginny Dougary September 4, 2020.

Alan Davies, the English stand-up comedian, actor, quiz show panellist and author, has written a new book, Just Ignore Him – a memoir of his childhood in which some horrible things happen that reverberate through his whole life. It is sad and sometimes funny, fastidiously observed and beautifully written. At its core, which permeates almost every page, is the greatest betrayal – after his mother died of leukaemia, when she was 38 and he was six-and-a-half, his father sexually abused him from the age of eight to 13.

When Spectrum was offered the interview, there were no restrictions on what could be asked – indeed, the publicist’s letter explicitly refers to “the abuse from his father” whom Davies years later “takes to court”. (Spoiler alert – that’s not exactly what happens.) The letter refers to the death of his mother, his memories of her, as well as him emerging with a “survivor’s” resilience.

In five decades of interviewing, I have rarely come across an interviewee who does not go through at least the motions of discussing the film or book or art show they are involved in which is the reason the interview has been granted. They have been contracted to do a certain amount of press and the journalist usually ticks the publicity box and then moves onto other aspects of the person that are of more interest.

But in this case, Davies’ memoir and himself are inextricable. The book is him. He wrote part of it when he was completing an MA in creative writing, specifically of memoirs, at Goldsmiths College, London University. Its head is Blake Morrison, who wrote his own celebrated memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

I had been somewhat anxious about how to frame my questions in the most sensitive way possible (and after reading the book, there are so many) but I was certain that we would be covering this material since it is the subject of the book and therefore the specific reason for doing the interview.

What I was totally unprepared for, and astonished by, was what actually happened in the interview, about 10 minutes in.

Q: So everybody who you were a fellow student with [at Goldsmiths] – or your tutors certainly – knew, since it was a memoir course, that you had been abused as a little boy?

A: It’s tricky, Ginny, because I don’t want to talk about that in the interview or outside the book. I’m looking for that not to be mentioned in interviews – I’m looking for people to discover that in the book.

Q: [short, vaguely panicky] How do you mean, sorry?

A: I am withholding from talking to journalists about this subject. What I and other people wrote on the course and how we shared material with one another – well, a great benefit of the course was the confidentiality and privacy that was afforded all of us.

Q: Got you, sorry but …

A: [louder and more insistent] … the absolute agreement that nothing that was discussed in the room was discussed outside the room – not online or anywhere.

Q: Got you …

A: And that was a really helpful thing and I really needed that. So, yes, the A-word I leave out of my vocab for all my promotional work.

Q: Oh , oh … I didn’t know this so let me clarify this and repeat this back to you to make sure I fully understand.

You don’t want to talk about those passages in your book or anything around it while promoting the book?

A: I don’t want the spoilers for my book in the pre-publicity: sexual abuse, going to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service and all that.

I explain the abuse has been mentioned by his Australian publishers when this interview was offered to Spectrum. There are some lengthy pauses.

A: I want people to learn about the abuse in the book. Not in the newspaper. And I’m not going to … this is annoying because they should have told you this. I am never going to talk to journalists about it.

Q: Oh, OK.

A: And they should have told you that.

Q: Well, it’s OK – I’ve got lots of other questions … but – er – obviously in the piece … So hold on – do you not want [even] any reference [to the abuse] in the piece without me asking you any questions?

A: No … no … no … no … and they should have told you that.

Q: OK.

A: The thing is, Ginny, it’s going to come out, right? It’s in the book. It might be reviewed and talked about and once the book’s out, there’ll be all kinds of things online and it’s not something I can control or want to control, but I don’t want to talk about it. [looks a bit upset]

That’s why I wrote a book.

I’ve quoted from the transcript at some length to convey the awkwardness of the moment and the bizarre premise of the whole interview. The untenable nature of not being able to discuss the guts and marrow of the book – the abuse is alluded to on most pages or the death of his mother (which Davies also ring-fences as off limits) and is literally what the memoir is about. I found myself alluding to the abuse without spelling it out, using the catch-all euphemism “difficult childhood”.

But to focus on the exquisitely summoned nostalgia of his ’60s childhood is like enjoying, for instance, the fabulous design of, say, mid-century furniture without a home to put it in. The elephant in the room was sitting on my shoulder for the full hour.

The larger point here is that Davies seems both aware and naive about what happens when you write a book and release it into the world. He knows that once this happens, his precious cargo can be picked over and his childhood and life now become public property. But the only way to have kept the genie in the bottle is not to have released it in a book in the first place.

It made me feel sad that the defenceless child, who should have been protected, is still lurking so close to the surface of this clever, genial 54-year-old man. Even at this remove, and having written the book about it, there was something so raw and naked about his response. As an actor, it’s possibly surprising that he hasn’t developed a script to deal with how to talk about this trauma. But then this was only the second interview he had done about his memoir with a journalist.

Towards the end, when I had found the publicist’s letter, Davies explained how “pissed off” he was about the difficult situation both of us had been put in. (Neither my editor nor I would have agreed to the interview if Davies’ terms had been put to us, in advance. Later his Australian publishers confirmed “they would, of course, not stop us from covering any information that is available in the book.). “I told them I didn’t want to do any press. I said, ‘Just put the book out and let it have a life of its own.’ I don’t want to do this. I hate this.”

Well, in between, we did – thank goodness – find plenty to talk about and, despite the undeniable weirdness of the situation, Davies did open up about other areas of his life and when he didn’t, that was revealing in a different way, too.

Mainly we talked about subjects around the abuse, the fallout from it; the lifelong depth charges from those formative years of never feeling safe. If you type in Alan Davies and Anger into your search engine, a number of stories come up relating to explosive historic incidents: the time he bit the ear of a homeless man outside Soho’s Groucho Club when he had drunk too much, then – two years later – how he got beaten up by three men outside the pub they had all been drinking in, kicked in the head and had to go to accident and emergency at the local hospital. More recently, there was an altercation with a climbing instructor who bumped into Davies’ children in a leisure centre and then took the story to a newspaper.

In the book there is also the occasional lash out, as when he remembers the cruelty of not being allowed to mourn his mother dying (who was not informed, herself, that she was going to die) and the further attempt at concealment when that six-year-old boy is told that he cannot tell his baby sister that their mother has died. The sister who kept asking when they could visit: “And she asked again and again … the secrets continue. As if it is the secrets that sustain these f—ing people.”

In person, as in most of the book, Davies’ tone is measured; his manner, mild. He talks at a low level, occasionally swallowing words. His manner is more Eeyore than Tigger and he doesn’t meet your eye. The manic mop of curls – familiar from all those years in Jonathan Creek, as well as appearances in other “soft murder” dramas, the quiz show QI and a variety of panel shows – is mostly grey now but he looks younger than his decade, in a blue and white striped T-shirt.

He is so evidently super-bright that I had assumed – before reading the book – that he was a smart grammar school boy (in fact he went to the same private school as his father and grandfather) who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge; his natural destination, as an acknowledged “brainbox” before he went off the rails as a teenager, becoming a compulsive thief and vandal. He graduated from Kent University, where he read drama, in 1988, also the year he did his first stand-up comedy show.

You say that anger is very helpful for a comedian? “Yes, and Dave Allen [one of his comedy heroes] is a good example of that.” But it’s not so great in normal life … have you found a way of diffusing your anger?

He starts by talking specifically about the book: “I wanted to not be vengeful and I didn’t want something angry so that the reader would say, ‘well, this is just one person letting rip and we need to hear the other person’s point of view’. It’s not a ‘misery memoir’. I’m not setting out to attack anybody or take anybody down or be angry in that sense.”

Well, this may have been Davies’ intention, but you cannot read Just Ignore Him (what his father urged Alan’s siblings to do when he ‘acted up’) without feeling anger yourself. How heartbreaking it is to read that when the first secret “special cuddle” occurred, the eight-year-old boy was so deprived of affection and soft words from his surviving parent that even though he knew, instinctively, it was wrong and strange for his father to caress his naked buttocks, the relief of being treated kindly for once eclipsed the shame.

(His father is still alive, at 86, with Alzheimer’s and in a home: Davies reported his actions to the police in 2017 but the case did not proceed to trial because of his father’s ill-health.)

“Anger,” he goes on to say, “is as normal as hunger. It’s as normal as any other feeling. And it’s not really about diffusing it or suppressing it.” After his “Mike Tyson incident”, he had been banned from returning to the Groucho Club. Are you still banned? “No, I’m not.”

Anyway, that was obviously not a great moment [it happened in 2007, the year he married Katie, 41, a children’s book writer; they now have three children – Susie, 10, Bobby, 9, and Francis, 4.] In 2009, the year of the pub fight, Davies said he had stopped drinking “because it’s incompatible with two-year-olds bouncing on your head”.

I wonder whether there was a relationship between alcohol and his anger. He looks blank: “Um.” OK, so do you still drink alcohol? “I do sometimes drink alcohol, yes. But I go through periods of abstinence and we all have to manage our addictions. Alcohol’s an interesting one because it’s everywhere you go and if you are having a period when you’re not drinking, you’ll get offered a drink every day.”

Anger is as normal as hunger. It’s as normal as any other feeling. Alan Davies

As for the climbing instructor scuffle in 2014, Davies maintained that the man knocked over Susie, then 4, on the stairs; the instructor claimed that the actor grabbed his throat. “Well that was his anger, you see. That was his rage. And my children are in tears. Then recognising me, he goes to a newspaper to try and hurt me.

“So I can be angry and I can be on the receiving end of anger. But, ultimately, when it affects your kids it’s really upsetting.”

There is a moment in the memoir when Davies records a retrieved memory of him with his mother; a moment of grace no less beautiful for it being commonplace: “she’d reach down and I’d reach up, my little fingers taking hold of one or two of hers instinctively, my arm rising as if gravity had let it go and our hands docking in silence, holding tightly, without thinking, fingers that belonged together”.

As a parent himself now he knows that wonderful feeling of putting your hand out for your child to grasp without needing to look back.

He says he has always enjoyed his work and he thought that being famous would be fun “although that turned out to be a very mixed bag, as you can imagine … but it has nourished me, as it were, and kept me going”.

The damage of his childhood may never be repaired. “What happened to me as a boy and my relationship with my father and the disintegrated family that I grew up in is problematic [Davies and his older brother remain estranged]. I’ve been very unsupported and it has made things difficult over the years. There is something not there.”

Both work and therapy have helped and Davies remains grateful to his friend Jo Brand for suggesting a therapist when he was in his late twenties (this led to eight-year therapy that seems to have had an emphasis on cognitive behaviour). Marrying at the age of 40 (he says he wasn’t ready before) and having a family of his own has been transformative.

His face becomes blurred with tenderness when he talks about his family. “The children aren’t here today and the silence is deafening me,” he says. “Having the presence of these people in your life who look at you like nobody else does and really do care about you – to feel that love coming your way is really something.”

It was Katie who wanted to recreate her own childhood, to some extent, and have a large family, “but I had nothing that I wanted to recreate. I had no childhood that I wanted to pass on.”

I had nothing that I wanted to recreate. I had no childhood that I wanted to pass on. Alan Davies

Given your “difficult childhood”, were you worried about what kind of parent you might be?

“You always worry about what sort of parent you are”, he replies. “You often spend time thinking you’re a terrible parent – ‘I’m too angry’, ‘I shout too much’ … I haven’t smacked mine [as he was a lot as a child] but I’ve grabbed hold of them and I’ve shouted at them and I’ve struggled to control my temper with them and it is really, really difficult, parenting. You have to keep focusing on showing them love.

“What I do a lot, which my father would never do, is I go and apologise to the child and they say, ‘God, you’re always saying “sorry”‘ to which I say, ‘Sorry’.”

Davies says it has taken him until now to be able to address properly what happened to him as a child. Until now, he has been emotionally paralysed. It’s partly that he’s older and there is more distance between the good times and the bad, but it’s also a direct consequence of having a family of his own: “I’ve thought more about parenting and how I was parented, and when I think about my relationship with my daughter and two boys – if the things that happened to me happened to them, I would be mortified.”

When I ask Davies whether he thinks the memoir could lend itself to a screenplay (it is very cinematic), he says he has been considering how to turn “this part of my life which I have not talked about publicly into a stage show of some sort”.

He believes he can share his secrets – on a stage, in a book, with thousands watching – but he cannot talk about them with an audience of one.

This disjunct (“something’s not there”) becomes radiantly clear when he finally does talk about himself as a damaged child – the fragmentation and separation of his adult self from the wounded child is revealed in his language ‘that boy’ – and his thieving even from the housekeeper who was so kind to him. “I hope that I convey that stealing is a source of regret, but at the same time, I don’t blame that boy for doing that. The temptation’s much too great for him and he can’t resist it. There were reasons for his behaviour and his character flaws …”

Not once was that young boy asked “Is there something wrong?”

He still has what he describes as a general low-level bedrock of sadness, but what makes him actively sad now, when I ask him, is anything to do with his children: “If they’re not happy or there’s something that I can’t affect or change or improve that makes me sad.”

As for how he feels about his book, he’s proud of it. “I found it very, very difficult and it wasn’t cathartic, but I took as much care as I have over anything really. I wanted this to be a record to last a long time and to last long enough so that when my children are old enough to read it, they will understand.”

Alan Davies’ memoir Just Ignore Him will be published by Hachette this week.

SEPTEMBER 4TH SYDNEY MORNING HERALD